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Monday, March 30, 2009

The Fundamentals of Gelastics

Justin E. H. Smith

We may as well start with a joke:

Primatologist to chimpanzee: “Bongo, bring me some food.”(Bongo brings a pile of stones instead of food, and shows a wide, teeth-bearing grin.)

Alright,
perhaps
not a joke, really. More a primate proto-joke. However we
classify it, though, I believe this report (based on a true story),
gives us
everything we need to generate a theory of humour. To get there, we
will have first to do some propaedeutic work, in order to determine
exactly what such a theory ought to explain, as also some
metatheoretical work to explain where exactly such a theory fits in
relation to other, similar projects.

1. The Funny and the Beautiful

Arthur Danto has noted that every systematic
philosopher, whether a refined aesthete or a complete philistine, has
at some point taken on the topic of art. One might add that nearly
every one of these has included an account of wit, humour, jokes,
comedy, or laughter, or some combination of these, within his theory of art
and beauty. Why is this? Is gelastics –to borrow a neologism coined
by Mary Beard from the Greek ‘gelan’: ‘to laugh’-- a subdomain of aesthetics? Let us consider some of the reasons for holding such a view.

There
seems to be a great similarity between the way people talk about the
‘aesthetic stance’ and the way they conceive the ‘sense of humour’. The
perception of something as a joke or as a work of art requires a
certain stance or perspective. Even if it is hard to say what this
will be, it seems that the explanations for the one often serve just as well
as accounts for the other. For example, Edward Bullough’s criterion of
psychical distance, which would account for the reluctance
theatre-goers feel at the thought of getting up to save Desdemona from
Othello, seems to function in the same way to provide the moral distancing that
enables one to laugh at a cruel joke (and most, perhaps all, jokes are
cruel, a point to which we might return later).

The
two domains
are also alike in that ‘getting it’ seems to require similar mastery in
each
domain of a vast number of pragmatic factors, including the repertoire
of the artist or comedian, the real-worldly circumstances to which the
artwork or joke is responding, etc. 'Wit', as opposed to jokes, will
generally depend entirely on context, as in the one-liner Danto reports
from a dinner
party at which Benjamin Disraeli was said to have uttered, upon having
his glass of champagne filled, "finally, something warm." This
exclamation is, of course, in itself neither funny nor unfunny, and
there does not seem to be a precise correlate to it among objects or
performances presented as art. These latter seem to be closer to
jokes, or to what in Russian are called 'anekdoty', that is,
jokes that take the form of very short stories and that are
reproducible, like a performance of 'St. James Infirmary', and perhaps
also like a presentation of Warhol's Campbells Soup cans, in a variety
of social circumstances, though likely with differing degrees of
success.

Relatedly, there seems to be a similar range of context dependency in
both humour and art, with the unambiguous instances of art and humour
depending on clear elaboration of well-known and relatively durable
conventions (e.g., putting oil paint on a canvas; commencing a joke
with ‘Knock knock...’), and the less clear instances depending on a
complex set of contextual factors that will determine whether the thing
in question is art or humour, or not. What makes the one funny and
the other art is entirely indiscernible in the syntactic or semantic
properties of the one, or the perceptual properties of the other.

Both
the aesthetic and the gelastic, further, bear an important relationship to the
ethical, though one that is difficult to account for adequately.
Perhaps revealingly, the exclamations “That’s not funny!” and “That’s
not art!” seem often to occur in parallel circumstances, and to conceal
straightforward moral outrage under the guise of correcting a category
mistake. That is, a blasphemous joke is funny (even if cheaply so)
just as surely as a Virgin Mary made out of elephant dung is art (even
if bad), and the insistence that it is not only serves to move the
denouncer outside of the domain of gelastic or aesthetic judgment
altogether.

Both are periodically invoked as playing a
redemptive role in a world that would be, in their absence, pure
nature, determination, disenchantment, etc. Thus in the twenty-first
of his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man Schiller calls
beauty our "second creator," since it is the aesthetic disposition that
saves us from "the one-sided compulsion of nature in feeling," and
provides "the ultimate gift of humanity, something infinite," namely,
freedom. Mutatis mutandis, is this assessment so different from the redemptive power of the Marx Brothers film cited by Woody Allen in Manhattan as the only thing standing between him and death?

There
are of course important differences. For one thing, gelastics is
concerned with the ‘ridiculous’ (Aristotle) or the ‘Satanic’ (Hobbes),
as opposed to the beautiful and the sublime. It may, however, be a
short step ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’, and it is certainly a
short step from the sublime to the tragic (Hume, for example, seems
simply to substitute the latter for the former). Our ancient
patrimony, moreover, compels us to think of tragedy and comedy as a pair of
opposites, even if in recent times we have such hybrids as
'tragicomedies', and even if there is a general sense that even the
darkest tragedies should straddle the once-clear boundary with the
darkest farce (e.g., the Coen brothers' version of No Country for Old Men).
There are probably deep-seated reasons why Aristotle devoted far more
energy to accounting for the tragic than for the comic in his Poetics,
yet these reasons probably do not flow from the greater philosophical
significance of tragedy, but only from its more exalted social status.

Another
difference is that there is direct, bodily evidence that
one has ‘got’ a joke, while there is no corresponding bodily state
signalling that one is perceiving aesthetically at the correct moment.
That said, however, theories of humour that take it as a subdomain of
moral theory, and as a question of manners, have generally preferred
the sort of gentlemanly wit that reacts to instances of humour in an
imperceptible, or barely perceptible, way. The Shaftesburian grin is
to be preferred to the Rabelaisian guffaw, as Simon Critchley puts it,
though
Critchley's attempt to assimilate gelastics to morality obscures, I
believe, what is philosophically most interesting about it, and indeed
what distinguishes it most sharply from other branches of aesthetics.
Whether or not one has a taste for the sort of grotesque and bawdy
humour that elicits strong bodily reactions, whether or not one thinks
the Cynics' practice of filling up on lentils in order to spoil with
their flatulence the public lectures of philosophical windbags, it is
hard to deny that crude, bodily humour is in fact humour par excellence,
while
a gentleman's appropriately modulated grin is a sort of
compromise, a sort of ceasefire between the comic and the respectable,
between the flatulent Cynics and the pompous philosophiser. For where
gelastics parts ways with aesthetics, where Woody Allen's redemption is
something quite different from Schiller's, has precisely to do with the
differing roles of the body in the aesthetic and gelastic experiences.
The beautiful provides a way out of the body, while the funny hurls us
right back into it. Laughter is generally described in the
natural-philosophical tradition as a sort of fermentative 'explosion'
in the body, or as an inundation of animal spirits, or, for
Descartes, in The Passions of the Soul, as a hydraulic event
initiated by a rapid flux in air pressure. It would be difficult to
imagine parallel, physiologising accounts of the experience of the
beautiful.

2. The Sudden Transformation of a Strained Expectation into Nothing

No
one understood these features of gelastics as clearly as Immanuel Kant. Significantly,
Kant places humour with music, and both of these very far from the
figurative arts with respect to the effects they bring about. For him, music no less than humour belongs to the ‘pleasant’ as
opposed to the ‘fine’ arts. In music, there is a sort of ‘play’ of
aesthetic ideas, in which a hearer moves "from the sensation of the body
to the objects of affects, and then back again, but with redoubled
force, to the body." In Section 54 of the Critique of Judgment,
a long comment following the 'Comparison of the Fine Arts with One
Another', Kant provides an extended comparison of the way in which music
and humour bring about their effects:

Music and what provokes laughter [Stoff zum Lachen] are two kinds of play with aesthetic ideas, or even with representations of the understanding, by which, all said and done, nothing is thought. By mere force of change they yet are able to afford lively gratification. This furnishes pretty clear evidence that the quickening effect of both is physical, despite its being
excited by ideas of the mind, and that the feeling of health, arising
from a movement of the intestines answering to that play, makes up that
entire gratification of an animated gathering upon the spirit and
refinement of which we set such store. Not any estimate of harmony in
tones or flashes of wit, which, with its beauty, serves only as a
necessary vehicle, but rather the stimulated vital functions of the
body, the affection stirring the intestines and the diaphragm, and, in
a word, the feeling of health (of which we are only sensible upon some
such provocation) are what constitute the gratification we experience
at being able to reach the body through the soul and use the latter as
the physician of the former.

Kant
is generally held to
have offered the most disappointing account of music in the history of
philosophy, one that cordons it off to the margins of human society and
human experience, while failing to charge it with that mysterian force
that
Plato gave it in arguing that it is something too powerful to be
allowed
to be permitted, unregulated, into the Republic. Certainly, the
feature of Kant’s philosophy of music that disappoints the most is
that, while for us music is supposed to be serious, for him it is of a
pair with
jokes. But those who are gravely serious about music should bear in
mind that, even if he ranked the figurative arts higher than the aural,
he does not seem to have known much, or cared much, about either. Kant
was likely the greatest thinker ever to
tackle the philosophy of art in the absence of any critical sensibility
whatsoever for the object of his theorising.

His sense of humour was equally underdeveloped, as
we’ll see. Yet, I want to argue, it is Kant who has given the strongest
theoretical account ever offered of the structure and nature of jokes.
Kant is the most prominent representative of what has come to be known
as the "incongruity theory of humour," according to which instances of
humour are generated out of the temporal experience of a mixing of
incongruous conceptual categories, a mixing that, as he elegantly puts
it, gives rise to "the sudden transformation of a strained expectation
into nothing [die plötzliche Verwandlung einer gespannten Erwartung in nichts]." Kant explains: “[W]e laugh, and it gives us a hearty pleasure: not because we find
ourselves cleverer than this ignorant person, or because of any other
pleasing thing that the understanding allows us to note here, but
because our expectation was heightened and suddenly disappeared into
nothing."

Does
Kant provide an example of what he has in mind? Unfortunately, he does.
"An Indian," he relates, "at the table of an Englishman in Surat,
seeing a bottle of
ale being opened and all the beer, transformed into foam, spill out,
displayed his great amazement with many exclamations, and in reply to
the Englishman’s question 'What is so amazing here?', answered, 'I’m
not
amazed that it’s coming out, but by how you got it all in'." (Transcendental Rimshot.)
One is tempted to say that the incongruity between the sophistication
of Kant’s gelastic theory on the one hand, and his idea of a good joke,
on the other, is itself funny. The incongruity inherent in his
incongruity theory of humour amounts to an instance and illustration of
the theory. The fact that one of the most sophisticated theories of humour in
history would be supported by such a weak joke is itself the
incongruity.

The incongruity theory is generally contrasted
with a number of other theories, of varying degrees of influence. One
is Mary Douglas’s anthropological account
of humour as the ‘irruption of the body’ into social situations in
which
it is supposed to remain hidden. Another prominent theory, associated
with Freud, has it that humour amounts to a sort of discharge of
tension, not so different from the other tics and symptoms of the neurotic patient.
The incongruity theory's most important philosophical alternative (at
least to the extent that it tends to be proferred by philosophers
rather than by anthropologists or psychoanalysts) is the "superiority
theory," according to which, as Hobbes explains, “the passion of
laughter is nothing else but sudden
glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in
ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own
formerly.” The "ludicrous," according to Aristotle, similarly, is "that [which]
is a
failing or a piece of ugliness which causes no pain of destruction" (Poetics,
sections 3 and 7). Going beyond the subject of comedy, in the Rhetoric
(II, 12) Aristotle defines wit as "educated insolence." Now it seems that, if there is anything
funny about Kant's joke, it is not the Englishman's superiority to the
Indian, but rather the experience of superiority it permits us to feel in relation to Kant.

Previous philosophical discussion of gelastics has
been muddled by the failure of the commentators to notice that these
sundry theories pertain to different aspects of the gelastic event, and
thus that it is a futile exercise to attempt to choose between them.
The incongruity theory has to do with the semantics of the joke, while
the superiority theory has to do with the pragmatics of the joke, and
also, likely, with metagelastic considerations. The Freudian relief
theory has to do with the individual psychology of the joke’s enjoyer
(most likely teller, but perhaps also hearer), while the irruption
theory has to do with the social psychology of the group in which the
joke is told.

One important thing to note in connection with Kant's account is that he seems to be concerned principally with anekdoty (in German, Scherze), that is to say with Stoff zum Lachen
that has an analysable formal structure that unfolds over the course of
the joke. Kant is thinking principally of humourous stories with which
dinner guests are regaled of a leisurely and pleasant evening. He does
not have in mind one-liners such as Disraeli's that would derive their
gelastic element entirely from context rather than from their own
formal structure. In this respect, Kant is in fact dealing with a
variety of literature, however diminished. As Jim Holt recounts, the modern joke shares a common parent with the novel:

During the centuries of Arab conquest, folktales from the Levant, many
of them satirical or erotic, made their way through Spain and Italy. An
Arab tale about a wife who is pleasured by her lover while her duped
husband watches uncomprehendingly from a tree, for instance, is one of
several that later show up in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Once in Europe,
the folktale began to cleave in two. On the one hand, with the
invention of printing and the rise of literacy, it grew longer, filling
out into the chivalric romance and, ultimately, the novel. On the other
hand, as the pace of urban life quickened, it got shorter in its oral
form, shedding details and growing more formulaic as it condensed into
the humorous anecdote.

If
Holt's account is correct, then we should approach the joke in roughly
the same way we do the haiku, as a particular, extremely distilled and
succinct variety of literature, with its own history and evolving
rules, rather than as interchangeable with wit. The joke is a literary
genre that has as its principle aim the expression of humour, in the
same way that landscape painting is an artistic genre that has as its
principle aim the portrayal of natural beauty. The incongruity theory
has to do with how well jokes fulfill this aim, while the superiority
theory has to do with the more straightforwardly moral dimensions of
any instance of humour, including wit and jokes.

One might
suppose that, if we take seriously the ‘into nothing’ clause of Kant’s
definition,
while nonetheless loosening our conception of ‘nothing’ to include
whatever is lower down on the hierarchy of being than the concept
deployed at the beginning of the joke, then we will see that much
humour does
indeed deploy this structure, and that incongruity in Kant’s sense may
not be saying anything so different from Mary Douglas's account. Yet
any careful, cross-cultural and trans-historical study of a wide range
of jokes will reveal that the incongruous structure by no means always
sends us plummeting down from the lofty and divine to the corporeal and
profane.

3. Formal Gelastics

We
cannot engage in such a study here, but a brief survey of a few jokes,
from vastly different times and places, may help us to illustrate the
distinctions made so far. To this end, it will help to introduce a bit
of formal-gelastical notation:

1. Let '!' signify the point in a joke at which the strained expectation finally snaps.2.
Let '⇓', '=>', and '⇑' signify the direction in the hierarchy of
value in which one is hurled as a result of this snapping.3. Finally, let '∫/' signify the superiority relation.

Let us consider the primate proto-joke with which we began. It seems it may be analysed as follows:

Edible !⇓ inediblechimpanzee-∫ /trainer.

Thus,
with respect to its formal structure, the chimpanzee's gesture counts as a joke because it
contrasts two incongruous categories, sending us plummeting downward
from the relatively lofty category of 'food' into the lowly category of
useless, inedible stones. The superiority at work in the joke occurs at
a different level, as a relation between the primatologist and the
primate.

The headlines of the satirical newspaper The Onion are noteworthy
for their condensation of the structure of the joke into the most
succinct syntactic form possible. Consider:

Clinton Feels Nation’s Pain, Breasts.

It seems that here with respect to incongruity, we have something like:

Lofty sentiment !⇓ lecherous action,

while with respect to superiority, we have:

Satirical newspaper-∫ / conventional newspapers.

Often, the plunge downward is less clear, as in this classic Soviet 'Vovochka' joke:

Schoolteacher: Vovochka, why are you throwing spit-wads in class?Vovochka: I’m a class enemy!

What we seem to have, with respect to incongruity, is something like this:

School prank (harmless) !⇓ political treason (serious),

while with respect to superiority, the exaltation of the adolescent antihero over establishment norms is clear:

Vovochka-∫ /class/teacher/political order.

Let us consider another Soviet joke, this time of the Jewish subvariety:

It
seems that here what we have is motion from a less exalted notion of
life to a more exalted one, as also an expression of the superiority of
those who have remembered the more exalted notion over the soul-less
bureaucrats who believe living just is habitation. Thus:

Living as habitation !⇑ Living as thriving
The irrascible soul-∫ /the soulless bureaucrat.

Or how about this joke from the ancient Greek joke book that has come to be called the Philogelos [Laughter Lover]:

Barber: How would you like your hair cut?Customer: In silence!

Here what we have is a distinctly philosophical joke, one that trades on the plurivocity of that innocuous word 'how':

One meaning of ‘how’ !=> another meaning of ‘how’,

and also, of course, an amusing instance of a haughty fellow abusing someone of a lower social station:

customer-∫ /barber.

What,
now, of Kant's joke? How is it to be analysed? With respect to
superiority, it is clear enough: we have both the superiority of the
worldly Englishman over the naive Indian, as well, it seems, as the
superiority of the reader over Kant himself, in view of Kant's
miserable choice of jokes. But what about the incongruity? Is it simply
this:

Foam expanding !⇓ Foam contracting ?

Is
it, to speak in contemporary terms, that the Indian has grasped the
thermodynamic character of the universe, and is picking out an apparent
instance of its violation? If so, then might it not be the Indian who
deserves to gloat in his superiority, and not the Englishman? I have no
idea. I don't understand the joke, and surely would have been left
sitting stone-faced and awkward in the Königsberg parlor where it once
had the local sage in stitches.